North Carolina’s Historic Fix to Death Penalty

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The North Carolina House is interested in capping the gasoline tax for the first half of 2012.


Two House committees approved Monday a bill keeping the state motor fuels tax at 35 cents per gallon through June 30. The gas tax is recalculated automatically twice annually based on a formula linked to wholesale gas prices. The Legislature's nonpartisan fiscal staff estimates the tax would grow to nearly 39 cents without a cap.


Republicans supporting the cap said it would give relief to the public while promoting accountability within the Department of Transportation. The bill would direct a study of the DOT tax structure. Opponents said the cap would mean $96 million less for road projects, maintenance and DOT programs.


North Carolina is one of 34 states in the U.S. that currently executes prisoners. The Death Penalty Information Center lists it as having the country’s sixth largest death row. The majority of people on it—86 out of a total of 157 inmates—are African American.


Advocates for Justice, an association of North Carolina’s defense attorneys, has joined the NAACP in publicly supporting the law during this most recent legislative backlash. The two groups wrote a letter in support of the Racial Justice Act earlier this month. The four-page letter cites a popular Michigan State University study that found that a defendant in North Carolina is 2.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim is white.


“The courts of North Carolina have been doing an exemplary job of managing litigation under RJA, both in terms of avoiding unnecessary costs and in terms of expediting review of serious claims of racial discrimination,” the letter reads. “Now is not the time for the General Assembly to tinker with the statute and create potentially new avenues of appeal.”


The joint letter submitted in support of the bill was filed one day after 43 of the state’s 44 district attorneys wrote a letter to state senators asking them to pass a new bill, Senate Bill 9, that would repeal the Racial Justice Act when the state’s General Assembly reconvened on Nov. 27. The prosecutors have said that they see the law as an attempt to end the death penalty in the state. “Do not allow North Carolina to continue this charade on its citizens, your constituents, with regards to the death penalty,” the letter said, according to the Associated Press.


“It was, in reality, a permanent moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina,” Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby said about Racial Justice Act, according to the Sun News.


The state House voted to nullify the Racial Justice Act in June. But the effort to repeal it in both chambers has been a top legislative priority for Republicans since they rose to power in 2010. Time and again, Republican lawmakers have been cited as saying that the law is merely an effort to stop the state’s executions altogether.


“They know historically if you are poor and African American, you are sentenced to death,” state Rep. Earline Parmon told local reporters about the fight to keep the law alive. “This is proven by many studies across the nation. So we know racially motivated convictions to death row are real.”